The Snow Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

behind, to spiral down the drain.
    He stares for a moment longer at his bathwater. It’s the usual water. It’s no different the morning after the night he’s seen something he can’t really have seen.
    Why, exactly, would Tyler believe this was a good morning to return them to the story of their mother?
    A time-snap: Their mother reclines on the sofa (which is here now, right here in their Bushwick living room), smoking, cheerfully bleary on a few old-fashioneds (Barrett likes her best when she drinks—it emphasizes her aspect of extravagant and knowing defeat; the wry, amused carelessness she lacks when sober, when she’s forced by too much clarity to remember that a life of regal disappointment, while painful, is also Chekhovian; grave, and rather grand). Barrett is nine. His mother looks at him with drink-sparked eyes, smiles knowingly, as if she’s got a pet leopard lying at her feet, and says, “You’re going to have to watch out for your older brother, you know.”
    Barrett waits, mutely, sitting on the sofa’s edge, at the curve of his mother’s knees, for meaning to arrive. His mother takes a drag, a sip, a drag.
    “Because, sweetheart,” she says, “let’s face it. Let’s be candid, can we be candid?”
    Barrett acknowledges that they can. Wouldn’t anything other than total candor between a mother and her nine-year-old son be an aberration?
    She says, “Your brother is a lovely boy. A lovely, lovely boy.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And you” (drag, sip) “are something else.”
    Barrett blinks, damp-eyed with incipient dread. He is about to be told that he’s subservient to Tyler; that he’s the portly little quipster, the comic relief, while his older brother can slay a boar with a single arrow, split a tree with one caress of an axe.
    She says, “Some magic has been granted to you. I’m damned if I know where it came from. But I knew it. I knew it right away. When you were born.”
    Barrett keeps blinking back the tears he’s determined not to shed in front of her, though he wonders, with increasing urgency, what, exactly, she’s talking about.
    “Tyler is popular,” she says. “Tyler is good-looking. Tyler can throw a football … well, he can throw it pretty far, and in the direction footballs are supposed to go.”
    “I know,” Barrett says.
    What strange impatience rises now to his mother’s face? Why does she look at him as if he were sycophantically eager, desperate to please some doddering aunt by pretending surprise over every twist in a story he’s known by heart, for years?
    “Those whom the gods would destroy …” his mother says, blowing smoke up into the crystals of the modest dome-shaped chandelier that clings like an upside-down tiara to the living room ceiling. Barrett isn’t sure whether she can’t, or won’t, finish the line.
    “Tyler is a good guy,” Barrett says, for no reason he can name, beyond the fact that it seems he has to say something.
    His mother speaks upward, toward the chandelier. She says, “My point exactly.”
    This will all start making sense. It will, soon. The square crystals of the chandelier, worried by the electric fan, each crystal the size of a sugar cube, put out their modest, prismed spasms of light.
    His mother says, “You may need to help him out, a little. Later. Not now. He’s fine, now. He’s cock o’ the walk.”
    Cock o’ the walk.
A virtue?
    She says, “I just want you to, well … remember this conversation we’re having. Years from now. Remember that your brother may need help from you. He may need a kind of help you can’t possibly imagine, at the age of ten.”
    “I’m nine,” Barrett reminds her.
    Almost thirty years later, having arrived at the future to which his mother was referring, Barrett pulls the plug on the bathtub. There’s the familiar sound of water being sucked away. It’s a morning like any other, except …
    The vision is the first event of any consequence, in how many years, about which